By Deirdre Spilman
Opinion Assignment Editor
Almost all schools have zero tolerance when it comes to weapons. When kids are at a younger, more impressionable age, people try to teach them that violence never solves anything. Overall, it’s a good lesson to learn.
But when 3-year-old Hunter Spanjers, a deaf child from Nebraska, is punished for signing his name because it looks like a gun, the school and administration are taking things too far.
Spanjers name is signed by slightly waving a crossed middle and index fingers. The Grand Island Public School District found Spanjer’s name in sign language to look sort of like shooting an imaginary handgun, thereby defying the school’s zero weapons policy, according to an Aug. 29 Fox News article.
To prevent Spanjers from inadvertently pretending to shoot his classmates and teachers, he is now forced to spell out his name, according to the same Fox News article.
Starting school for the first time can be difficult enough. Spanjers takes on the task with less of an advantage because he is unable to hear and taking away his ability to communicate his own name is simply not fair.
Spanjer’s signed name is not something his parents developed for him. It is a name registered through the Signing Exact English (SEE) language system. However, Nebraska schools use American Sign Language (ASL), which is where the confusion began.
What diabolical, terrifying plot does the school board think they are going to thwart by making a 3-year-old change the way he signs his name? Perhaps this could be considered a threat if Spanjers was in elementary school, but the chances of a preschool student recreating his own interpretation of the Columbine High School massacre are slim to none.
Sign language is the only way for Spanjer to communicate. Depriving him of his communication is putting him at an additional disadvantage. He wasn’t making the gesture to be rude or violent. He was simply stating his name in the only way he knew how.
Should a school punish its student for simply communicating?
Kids are now exposed to violent images at a younger age via TV, film and video games. A simple gesture is not the worst thing these children are witnessing. If we’re going to put a censor on anything, it should be the violence most affecting the children.
We should be teaching children to be more accepting, not cause feuds when we see somebody who is a bit different than us.
Spanjers was not trying to cause any controversy with his actions. He was probably just trying to introduce himself to his fellow preschool students. Imagine being told that you were doing something right off the bat on your first ever day of school.
A 3-year-old is the least of society’s problems.
Spanjer should be entitled to the freedom of speech that every other American citizen is granted. Just because his way of speaking is different does not mean he should be penalized for it. Spanjers is disabled, in my experience most people will go out of their way to make life easier for the disabled. Why is this scenario so different from any others?
His school needs to consider the situation from his point of view and realize that Spanjer’s way of signing his name is not a credible threat. He is just trying to communicate.
spilmadn10@bonaventure.edu.
